Returning from his sojourn in the south of France, in the autumn of 1963, Marr discovered the art of Chaïm Soutine. A major exhibition of the French artist’s work was organised by the Arts Council and staged at Tate from September to November that year. Soutine was already a name known to him, but Marr was ‘bowled over by the paintings’, which would radically reshape his landscape and still life work in the years that followed. The impact of works such as Soutine’s Jug with Lilacs (1920, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University) exhibited at the Arts Council show is immediately visible in Still Life with Flowers made in the winter of 1963-1964. Frenetic, churning energy overpowers any search for structural massing in the composition. Marr’s joy in the gestural rendering of individual petals is evident. Thinly-applied smears constitute an indistinct background and press the flowers themselves to the fore, forming zones that sit in and out of focus, suggesting Marr’s eye was guided by his recent experience as a photographer. The substantial scale of this work demonstrates Marr’s now confident, mature approach to still life. Having recently moved into his new home at Higher Chuggaton in Devon, in subsequent years he would become a studio potter apprenticed to Martin Leach, son of the famous St Ives potter Bernard Leach. Through the scale and passion contained in Marr’s vision in Still Life with Flowers, we are given a premonition of his sensitivity to the drama and vibrancy of the domestic space that allowed him to apply his talents to pottery with success. Marr was aware of and responsive to Bomberg’s still lifes made in 1943 [cat. 9], which sit alongside the wartime abstraction of Ivon Hitchens’ still life and landscapes. Marr’s Still Life with Flowers participates in these connections but ultimately looks elsewhere. In the context of Marr’s career, the work’s photographic isolation of its subject – to the extent that it carries a mood of penetration and revelation – is an independent construct. Through what is contained within that revelation – a dynamic, metamorphic and freshly-Soutinian vision of nature – it is a personal transcription of what Marr saw as most valuable in the work of the modern French master at Tate.